Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5)

by Travis S. Taylor

  Rackman pressed forward, down, and deeper into the alien ship. The corridor they had taken was just large enough that the three tanks could fit with a little room to spare on either side. There were clone AEMs on the tanks behind him and on foot, bouncing about, firing their rifles at targets of opportunity. Davy had expected heavier resistance, but so far they had only seen a few handfuls of Chiata ground troops. With the buzz-saw bots and tanks, the numbers had been on their side.

  “Commander Rackman, my red force tracker cannot get a solid read on enemy numbers in here,” the tank commander told him. “We could be leading ourselves into an ambush and not know it.”

  “Yeah, I don’t like that either, Franklin, but what can we do about it? Just keep pressing forward. If we get caught up in an ambush, we’ll deal with it then. That’s why we brought tanks.” Just as Davy made the statement, they turned the corner into a barricade covered with red and green blurs firing blue energy bolts at them, filling the void between them with bright flashes of ionization trails and molten materials as the bolts hit. A bolt caught the AEM Malcolm clone on the right of Davy square in the face. The clone never knew what had hit him. His shields held on the first shot, but the second one vaporized the clone’s body from mid-torso up.

  One of the red and green blurs rushed toward the center tank, firing a continuous barrage of blue plasma bolts. Rackman returned fire and tracked the blur as best he could, but it was just too fast for him to track. His hypervelocity rounds splattered behind the alien every step of the way. Then the alien dove forward firing, and one of the bolts hit the tank just beneath where Rackman was laying prone. The plasma burst against the forward shields of the tank and burned through to metal. The forward bulkhead of the tank glowed red hot but was undamaged otherwise. Davy, on the other hand had taken a faceful of the molten metal spray, and his helmet was peppered with pockmarks. His suit diagnostics and alerts started going off in his mindview.

  “Screw this!” He ducked his head and popped a grenade from the shoulder launcher. The grenade thawoomped out of the tube and exploded at the feet of the Chiata attacker tossing it off balance but not killing it. Several battlebots jumped at the alien but it dodged, rolled, and at once stood up, grabbing one of the metal killer bots in its hands, and two tendrils of amorphous armor shot out from within the alien’s torso and harpooned through the bot, destroying it.

  “Shoot those bastards!” Rackman ordered as he rolled backwards off the tank and to his feet. Just as he came to rest on one knee, with his rifle firing full auto into the multiple advancing blurs, the big gun of the lead tank fired twice. The hundred millimeter rounds exploded against the barricade, throwing shrapnel, plasma, and alien body parts in every direction. Davy continued to fire as buzz saw bots poured in around them and crossed the barricade. Tanks two and three fired a round each into the alien barricade. The fighting didn’t dwindle at that point. Instead, Chiata screamed as they fought to their last breath and more and more of them seemed to just crawl out from anywhere. Rackman kept pressing and pressing until their line finally broke.

  “Commander Rackman,” Nancy monitored the team’s progress in her DTM view while at the same time doing what she could to fight off the Chiata in the ball around them. “We need to be making faster progress.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Rackman replied over the net. “We ran into a couple of snags along the way and the bastards are holed up and putting up some serious resistance. We’ve started taking on casualties, ma’am, and I’m afraid we’re at a slow grind down here until we come up with a better plan or bigger guns. I’ve sent in the buzz-saw bots, wave after wave, but I think the Chiata have figured out how to neutralize them.”

  “Quit sending robots to do a SEAL’s job, Commander,” Nancy ordered him.

  “Understood, ma’am. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “We have to take this objective, Commander! Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Gunner, keep targeting and firing. I don’t want you to stop until the DEGs overheat and melt, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Captain.” The Malcolm clone gunner continued operating his console emotionlessly and efficiently. Nancy counted up the ships that were still functional. In less than five minutes they had already lost two of the Beta group and several were approaching the questionable mark. The four that had rammed the megaship had done their jobs and were now fighting towards the interior of the alien ship with hopes of exploiting the latest Buckley maneuver. The builder bots were working feverishly right behind the buzz-saw bots and ground troops, pushing ever closer, centimeter by centimeter, toward the alien power sources.

  “Captain, the Admiral just lost another ship.” The Air Boss and acting XO announced. Nancy saw the ship in her mindview vanish from space through a hyperspace tube. It was damaged beyond fighting and all it could do was escape. They’d hopefully catch up with it at the rendezvous point after the battle.

  At least they got away, Nancy thought to her AIC.

  The Beta attack wave is taking a very severe beating, Allison told her. According to my simulations, if they continue with the same attrition rate, they will not be able to hold off the Chiata for the full duration of time we will need in order to connect the shield generators to the megaship’s power source.

  We need to tell that to the General, Nancy thought. Perhaps we need a new tactic.

  I have already transferred this information to Abigail. She assures me the General has a plan.

  Any idea what that plan is?

  Yes, I do.

  Well, don’t leave me hanging. What is it?

  DeathRay.

  I see. Nancy both smiled and frowned inwardly at the same time.

  Chapter 31

  February 19, 2407 AD

  U.S.S. Sienna Madira

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Tuesday, 12:55 A.M. Ship Standard Time

  While the General had agreed to let DeathRay lead the ground teams into the alien ship with the goal of seeking out, capturing, and holding the bridge, he’d probably assumed that Jack was going to attack wearing just an armored suit. But Jack had decided to game the orders, perhaps, just a step farther than was actually within the spirit of them. While he had no intentions of doing any “flying” whatsoever inside an alien megaship, Jack had figured that he was safest and, more to the point, most lethal in his own mecha rather than in just a suit.

  Once the first attack wave of tankheads, groundpounders, and battlebots tore through the Chiata ship from the Madira’s aft hangar, DeathRay led the second team right in behind them. But where the first team turned downward and aftward to find the power sources Jack’s team turned up and aftward, headed for the little bump that stuck up between the blue-beam spires that was suspected of being the bridge.

  DeathRay pounded forward in bot mode in his Ares-T fighter mecha, clanking hard against the alien deck plates and blasting holes through bulkheads rather than looking for alternative pathways to the objective. Jack had decided that the shortest distance between the two points, A, where he was, and, B, where he needed to be, was a straight line filled with explosives. Several of the Archangels followed behind him, pounding down the alien corridors and firing from the hip the large sixty millimeter plasma cannons at any of the Chiata that dared to blur in their general direction.

  “Fish, you keep our six clear and blast the shit out of anything that doesn’t ping blue force,” DeathRay said to his second in command and former wingman. “We need to push through these bulkheads and up five floors at least.”

  “Roger that, DeathRay.” Fish replied. Jack could see in his battlescape view that the bot-mode mecha of his squadron were moving swiftly in a diamond formation with Jack at the point and Fish at the rear in an Ares-T. The two side points of the diamond were filled with USMC Lieutenant Wiley “Bridge” Cruise and USMC Second Lieutenant Dimitri “Backup” Romanov, both piloting FM-12s. Several other mechas filled in the gap
s of the formation. The mecha pilots burst through the alien corridors like bulls in a china shop, tearing away at everything they passed.

  “Hold up!” Jack held up his giant bot hand as he came to a crossing in the corridor. He hugged the mecha back against the wall, bringing the barrel of his cannon up. “I’ve got nothing on active sensors, but that might just mean we’re getting cloaked.”

  “I say we go full floods and hope we flash blind some of the bastards,” Bridge suggested. “At the least, we might make them shit their armor.”

  “I’m good with that,” Jack thought. “Floods on then. Hell, I’m going full on everything. They know we’re here, might as well see if radar and QMs can get anywhere.”

  “Understood.” Fish replied. “We’re all going full sensor suite on.”

  “Okay, on three,” Jack said and then counted to three, leaping out into the corridor with his cannon at the ready. Immediately, targeting Xs appeared in his mind and flashed from yellow to red.

  Several blurs screeched down the corridor and slammed into him, causing his shields to flicker blue and white flashes of light. Jack turned his mecha sideways and grabbed at the shoulder of one of his attackers, but it moved out of the way. While the aliens in their body armor were a good three meters tall, that was still like a lapdog barking at the heels to a full-up bot-mode mecha. So, the alien ground troops were like angry insects swarming up on them. That made Jack recall how it felt fighting the smaller bots over the past few years before they had found the Chiata. He needed to use those types of fighting moves against the multiple smaller foe.

  Jack stomped the floor with his mechanized boot as hard as he could, shaking deck plates loose from their moorings. The impact took the Chiata ground trooper nearest him off balance and Jack swatted it like a fly with the back of his mechanized hand and then swiped the one to its left with the barrel of his cannon. The first alien’s shields flickered out, and the impact of its body against the bulkhead likely broke its neck. The second one jumped up, but not in time to keep Jack from stomping it into the deck plating with his giant bot-mode foot.

  “Go to auto DEG targeting for the ground troops!” he ordered.

  Candis, take them out.

  I’ve got them, Jack, but I’ll have to target optically because they are jamming the radar and the QMs still don’t work.

  Understood. Just do it, he thought.

  Roger that.

  Directed energy beams fired from the shoulder mounts on all the mecha bots, targeting the red and green ground troop blurs. The Chiata moved so fast that they were barely visible to the human eye, but to the high-speed optical cameras on the mecha they might as well have been sitting still. The AIC supercomputers quickly developed a tracking algorithm from the optical sensor data, and the squadron of mecha using their directed energy beams cut them down as quickly as they attacked.

  Jack left the beams on full auto at his AIC’s discretion and bounded through the line that the Chiata megaship crew was forming. He fired his cannon several times, scattering molten debris and aliens in all directions. It looked to Jack like the Chiata ship’s crew had used anything they could get their tendrils on to create a makeshift barrier a few tens of meters across the corridor leading into a larger high bay area that had a stairwell and a ramp leading upward. Jack wasn’t sure if the aliens knew he was headed for the bridge or if they were just the aliens that got in his way, but it did appear to him that the closer he pushed his team inward and upward, the heavier the resistance got.

  “Listen up. That ramp ahead on the other side of the barrier is our target. I think that will take us up and closer to the bridge,” Jack told his squadron. “We need to push through there and then up a few decks.”

  While the resistance got heavier, it was mainly in numbers of ground troops. It seemed to Jack that the Chiata must have been arrogant to the point that they didn’t believe anyone would ever board them. Either that or they were really slow at responding within their own ship. But he thought about that and wondered how quickly a response would be mustered if the Madira had been boarded.

  As soon as Jack had that thought, a deafening boom resounded in the corridor and a very large fireball pounded into the mecha to his left, knocking Bridge off his feet and making his shields flicker.

  “Holy shit!” Fish shouted. “AA fire!”

  “They’ve got an anti-tank gun!” Fish exclaimed. “Bridge, get your ass up and take cover!”

  “Fuck that,” DeathRay added. “Fox!”

  He fired a missile down the hallway into the bulkhead and out the other side, waiting to detonate it until it had passed the barricade and penetrated all the way through bulkhead behind the ramp. As the missile exploded the bulkhead, it bulged and vaporized into a fireball that slammed against the Chiata troops and their barricade structure. Shrapnel rained against his mecha, making it ring like a bell, and the blast wave nearly knocked him off balance.

  Shit, that was too close for missiles, he thought.

  I would agree, Jack. Candis replied. I don’t recommend that again.

  Right.

  “Warning! Enemy targeting radar lock! Warning! Enemy targeting radar lock!” his Bitchin’ Betty chimed.

  “Shit! Move!” DeathRay ordered. “They’ve got guided weapons on us! I’m locked up!”

  “Guns, guns, guns!” Fish shouted, and DeathRay could see the fireballs splattering against the bulkhead with thunderous booms and flashes of plasma. “Guided weapons, hell! Check your tracker! There’s mecha in here!”

  Fish was right. As soon as she’d said it, Jack’s red force tracker lit up like a Christmas tree with bogies. There were at least five porcupine mecha craft bouncing about across the corridor and behind that barricade. One of the porcupines bounced up and over and came down on top of DeathRay. He had just enough time to fall back and roll over in a backwards judo roll to avoid getting stomped on.

  “Guns, guns, guns!” DeathRay grunted as his mecha sprang upward to its feet. The targeting X flashed red and Jack held down on the trigger. But the mecha was faster than Jack’s response. “Shit.”

  It slipped past him into the middle of the squadron’s formation and grabbed Backup around the shoulders, slamming him against the wall with a thunderous screech of metal on metal, and then a tendril shot out from the porcupine’s torso and pressed clean through the mecha’s shield generators. Fish was quick to respond and grabbed the alien mecha about the head, yanking it over her shoulder and throwing it across the room. As the alien was flung over, a second tendril wrapped itself around Fish like a boa constrictor.

  Bridge dropped to a knee, firing his cannon into the torso of the alien mecha, cutting free the tendrils that had constricted Fish and Backup. All of this happened so fast that DeathRay barely had time to think, but what he did think was, “Fox three!”

  The missile cut out across the room and exploded almost as soon as he fired it. The alien’s shields failed, and secondary concussion waves from the blast knocked all of them backwards. Jack kept his balance and bit down on his bite block, making himself be patient for just a fraction of a second longer. Then the targeting X turned red.

  Again, too close for missiles, Candis scolded him.

  No shit?

  “Guns, guns, guns!” He said. The cannon rounds ripped through the alien porcupine mecha, shredding it to pieces and throwing sparks, debris, plasma, and red and green viscous fluids about.

  “I’ve got several more coming in!” Bridge said.

  “I’ve got ’em, Bridge! Stay on my wing!” Backup acknowledged him.

  DeathRay took a quick glance at the mindview battlescape image with the hope that he’d see an obvious weakness to exploit in some sort of a plan. But it was pretty straightforward. The aliens were on one side of the room guarding an up ramp, and the Archangels were on the other side of said room wanting to go up said up ramp. It was going to be straight out head-to-head, force-on-force combat. There was nothing left to do but to go in there and kill those motherf
uckers.

  “Attack, Archangels! Attack!” Jack ordered.

  Chapter 32

  February 19, 2407 AD

  U.S.S. Sienna Madira

  Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Tuesday, 1:02 A.M. Ship Standard Time

  “Thank you, Captain! Keep me posted,” Alexander said to the Teena clone who was captain of the ship taking the port-aft shield generator of the alien megaship. The clone-driven supercarrier was efficiently taking on its mission and had already completed the initial connections between the supercarrier’s shield generators and the power source. Alexander wondered if it was because that section of the megaship was where they had encountered the least amount of resistance, but he couldn’t be certain. That Teena clone might have just had one hell of a crew and been one hell of a captain.

  “Sir, the Beta wave just lost another ship!” Firestorm told him. “They’re down to a baker’s dozen. Casualties are stacking up, sir.”

  Sir, I have gone through the simulations that Allison has completed and she is quite right, Abigail alerted him. We are going to fall short by almost three minutes. DeathRay has less than five minutes to make it to the bridge of the alien ship if his team is going to be of any assistance here.

  DeathRay will make it. Alexander knew he could count on Jack. But he wasn’t sure about the builder bots. But if Jack has to buy us more time than his op will afford, then we’re in trouble.